What is Buddhism?

Question 60014.

Buddhism and Christianity both begin by taking suffering seriously, which is more than most modern philosophies manage, and then they move in opposite directions. That shared starting point is why Buddhism appeals to thoughtful Westerners who have given up on church.

It is also why the differences need stating clearly. A faith that diagnoses the same illness and prescribes the opposite treatment is not a variation on the theme.

Where it began

Siddhartha Gautama was born into a princely family in what is now Nepal, traditionally in the sixth or fifth century before Jesus. Sheltered from suffering as a young man, he encountered sickness, old age and death, abandoned his household and sought an answer.

After years of severe asceticism he rejected that path and, according to the tradition, attained enlightenment while sitting under a tree. He then taught for some forty years, and the title Buddha means the awakened one.

The movement later divided into Theravada, dominant in Sri Lanka and south east Asia, and Mahayana, which spread to China, Korea and Japan and includes Zen and the Tibetan traditions. Buddhism and Christianity both diversified, though along different lines.

The four truths at the centre

The core teaching begins with the observation that existence involves dukkha, usually translated suffering but closer to unsatisfactoriness. Nothing lasts, and our attempts to hold on to what is passing produce our misery.

The cause is identified as craving, the grasping desire that binds us to the cycle. The remedy is the cessation of craving, and the path to that cessation is the eightfold path of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.

It is a coherent and serious analysis, and I do not sneer at it. Buddhism and Christianity agree that the human heart is disordered in its desires. Where they part is on what desire is for and what has gone wrong with it.

No self, no soul

The doctrine of anatta teaches that there is no permanent self. What we call a person is a bundle of processes, constantly changing, with no enduring core. This follows from the teaching that all things are impermanent.

The goal, nirvana, is often described as the extinguishing of the flame, the end of craving and of rebirth. Whether that constitutes annihilation or an indescribable state is debated within the tradition itself.

Scripture says something else entirely. You are a person known by name, made in God’s image, and destined either for resurrection life or for judgement. Jesus said that whoever believes in Him will never die, John 11:26, and the promise assumes there is a continuing somebody to keep it to.

Buddhism and Christianity on the question of God

Classical Buddhism is not a theistic system. The Buddha declined to answer questions about a creator, treating them as unhelpful for the practical business of ending suffering, and later traditions developed devotion to various figures without a creator God at the centre.

This means that Buddhism and Christianity are not two answers to the same question about God. One of them regards the question as a distraction, which is a more fundamental difference than disagreement would be.

It also means there is nobody to forgive you. Karma operates impersonally, and the debt is worked off rather than pardoned. Grace requires a person who can extend it, and an impersonal process cannot love you.

Suffering diagnosed and answered

The Buddhist analysis says suffering comes from desire, and the cure is to stop desiring. Scripture says suffering entered through sin, that creation was subjected to futility, and that the cure is redemption rather than detachment.

That difference shows up in the treatment of love. If attachment is the root of suffering, then loving deeply is dangerous. Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb precisely because He was attached, and He never suggested that the answer was to care less.

Christian hope does not remove desire, it redirects and finally satisfies it. Paul writes that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed, and I develop the wider question in what about the problem of evil.

What is genuinely admirable

I want to be fair. Buddhist ethical teaching about non violence, restraint and compassion is serious, and Buddhist practice of attention and stillness exposes something shallow in much Western Christianity.

A believer who cannot sit quietly for ten minutes has something to learn from the discipline even while rejecting the framework. The Psalms tell us to be still and know that God is God, and stillness has fallen out of our habits.

Recognising this is not compromise. Buddhism and Christianity can share an observation about restlessness while disagreeing entirely about its cause and its cure.

Mindfulness in the West

Mindfulness has been extracted from its religious setting and marketed as a clinical technique, and Christians ask whether they may use it. My answer is that it depends entirely on what is meant.

Attention to breathing and the deliberate slowing of an anxious mind are not religious acts, and there is nothing in Scripture against them. Emptying the mind as an end in itself, or practices aimed at realising that the self is illusory, carry the doctrine with them.

Biblical meditation runs the other way. The blessed man’s delight is in the law of the Lord, and on it he meditates day and night, Psalm 1:2. The Hebrew hagah suggests muttering over something, a mind filled rather than emptied.

Talking with a Buddhist friend

Begin with the shared diagnosis. Both faiths agree that something is deeply wrong with the world and with us, and that most people are anaesthetising themselves rather than facing it. That is a great deal of common ground.

Then press gently on the personal. Ask whether an impersonal process can love, whether compassion makes sense if there is finally no one there to be compassionate towards, and what happens to the longing to be known.

And speak about Jesus rather than about religion. Many Western Buddhists have rejected a version of Christianity they encountered second hand, and meeting Jesus in the Gospels is often the first honest look they have taken.

The offer that has no parallel

The heart of it is this. Buddhism and Christianity both promise release, and one arrives at it by detachment while the other arrives at it by union with a person who died for you.

Jesus does not say let go of desire. He says come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, Matthew 11:28. Rest is offered as a gift from someone rather than achieved as a state by effort.

That is the offer I would put in front of any Buddhist friend, and I would put it in front of him slowly, over years if necessary, as a friend rather than as an opponent.

Two things worth clearing up

Two misunderstandings circulate widely enough to be worth naming. The first is the claim that Jesus travelled to India during the unrecorded years and learned from Buddhist teachers. There is no early evidence for it whatsoever, and the documents usually cited are nineteenth century productions of doubtful origin.

The second is the claim that the Buddha and Jesus taught essentially the same ethic, so that Buddhism and Christianity differ only in packaging. Read the Sermon on the Mount alongside the Dhammapada and the difference in the shape of the teaching is immediate. Jesus speaks continually of a Father who sees, rewards, forgives and receives, and He speaks with an authority that keeps pointing back to Himself.

That last feature is the one that will not fit any comparison. The Buddha pointed away from himself to a path, and said the teaching mattered rather than the teacher. Jesus said I am the way, and told people to come to Him. You can admire both men, but you cannot treat those two statements as versions of the same idea.

Why the appeal is worth understanding

It is worth asking honestly why Buddhism attracts intelligent Westerners while the churches empty. Part of the answer is that it makes no historical claims that anyone feels obliged to defend, and part is that it asks for practice rather than belief.

There is also something in the tone. It arrives without the baggage of Christendom, without the scandals, and without the association with a version of church many people found cold. Buddhism and Christianity are not being weighed on equal terms in the popular imagination, because one of them is being compared at its best with the other at its worst.

I do not say that resentfully. It is a call to the church rather than a complaint about the competition. If people are looking for stillness, seriousness and a community that lives what it teaches, those things belong in a Christian congregation and they have been available all along.

So, now what?

If the discipline of Buddhist practice shames you, let it. Take the rebuke and put fifteen unhurried minutes with Scripture back into your day.

Then think about who you know. Buddhism and Christianity are usually discussed in the abstract, and the people you actually meet are not abstractions.

And sit with the difference between letting go and being carried. One requires you to release everything you love. The other invites you to bring it all to somebody who can hold it. Which of those does your praying assume?

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Matthew 11:28, ESV